The Los Angeles Times quoted Brie Loskota, CRCC managing director, in an article about CRCC’s American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute partnership with the Jewish Funds for Justice program, the Community Organizing Residency.
A key co-sponsor is the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, part of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Shah is one of 65 Muslim Americans who have graduated from its nine-month certificate program since 2008.
“We try to get Muslim leaders to think not just about their own community but how their community works in the larger society,” said Brie Loskota, a co-founder of the institute.
She and director Nadia Roumani came up with the idea for the institute in 2005, concerned that American Muslim leaders were not adequately participating in public discourse.
Loskota says the two women wished to “expand rather than contract the public square” and asked themselves how to help Muslims get from “suspect to full citizens.”
“We are simply saying that Muslims should be part of the national conversation. It’s part of religious pluralism in our country,” Loskota said. “We found that Muslim leaders often don’t know a process exists or how to participate in it.”
